


light as feather, bright as light

by Ler



Category: Strange Magic (2015)
Genre: F/M, Light princess au, Strange Magic Week 2016, fairytale AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 09:32:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7839589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ler/pseuds/Ler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His Royal Highness Prince Arthur Brogan Theodor Montgomery Kingsley of Sealand was drowning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	light as feather, bright as light

**Author's Note:**

> Strange Magic fandom is having a week and I planned to write so much and I'm so late. But I was thinking about this au for a very long time and I'm so glad something came out of it.

His royal highness prince Arthur Brogan Theodor Montgomery Kingsley of Sealand was drowning.

To him, being the son of his nation of pretty much nothing else but water, it was not a new occurrence. The water lulled, a tender embrace, a loving caress, a taste of home, as his body, motionless, heavy with soaking military uniform, slowly descended to the bottom of a pond or a lake or whatever that was, the expanse of shimmering water growing darker and darker. Soon it would have been indistinguishable from the night sky from which he came, barrelling into its surface less like a man and more like a rag - yet still, not in a prince-like, or a heir-like, and especially, not conqueror-like manner. The council would surely be horrified.

But what does a council care about desert hurricanes? What do they know of lakes, hidden among the foliage of the strip of woodland, separating them from what they had and what they wanted?

Yet there he was.

 

_‘Keep you feet on the ground, Bog,’ his father’s voice rang again, the foreign vivid blue of his eyes betraying his worry, when the wind filled the sails and the ropes creaked, sleek with salt and bitter goodbyes. ‘But your head in the sky. The wind will tell you what to do.’_

_And at the time Brogan believed him. Until the wind didn’t bring his father back, and the land pulled him down so hard he could barely stand, and nothing could raise him up again_.

 

Slowly, he closed his eyes. Just like his father, he would be lost the weight of his own, and to the water his land was so rich of.

 

But something flashed across his face, once, twice, and incessant flicker of light that had no place in this darkness he make his grave. He cringed at it, his heavy eyelids raising for a peek.

It shone from above, catching the light of stars and the moon, but so unlike both of them: like a trasluscent tentacle of a hundred-year old medusa, it twisted and turned, small metallic pieces at its rims catching glimpses of light, and exploding in rays of precious gold, even through the rich royal purple of the piece’s sheen.

It descended towards him, slowly, delicate and otherworldly, and for the first time in his life - the first time that he cared to remember, certainly - Brogan, the Solemn Sealand heir, did something against his better judgement, against the myriad of voices, some of the council, some of his advisers:

 

_(and one of his mother, annoyed, angry, hungry)_

_(Go, Live, Discover)_

 

The high prince raised his lead-like hand and stretched it towards the unknown.

 

The unknown, in turn, stretched its tail all the way to the surface, and as he tugged at it, the purple silk and the row of smallest golden coins, it tugged back.

**Hard**.

 

The prince didn’t know why he didn’t let go. Maybe it was his stubbornness, since he signed up for whatever that was and he was going to see it to the very end. Maybe it was curiosity, a quality he didn’t know he had until that very moment.

Or maybe, he thought, as the length of cloth dragged him, violently, to the surface, he was a bit wishful, that this was different in the world where nothing ever changed.

 

_(not the war, not the poverty and greed his council was so hellbend on that they ordered him to do a double regicide, not the berating prosperity of their neighbors, with their golden cities, ruled by a dying old man with a dead son, and his daughter, the supposedly flying witch)_

 

  
He didn’t believe in superstitions, but maybe he should have started, that with sudden hurricanes that blow away armies, and appearing lakes of crystal water, and ten foot long scarfs saving his life.

 

  
He crashed into the world, his lungs erupting in a choir of coughs, the cloth still secure in his hand. It continued its relentless pull, dragging him to the shore, until it suddenly stopped, not that he cared with his whole body racking and heaving on the muddy ground.

And then he just laid there, dripping wet and miserable, rolling on his side as the gentle tide splashed against him and a sharp cry of a bird of prey ran above his head.

_His_ bird of prey, the last gift of his father, and a relieved sigh almost made its way to his mouth.

“You stupid tenacious bird,” he muttered to another cry of the falcon. “Of course you would be just fine.”

He crawled to his knees, no matter the grime, his eyes rising in search of the familiar plumage, training the bare dark roots of a tree by his face, up the bark, carved with cracks and natural scars, the wide strip of cloth almost haphazardly thrown over it, until-

 

Until it ended in a loop around the narrow waist of a girl, stuck in the array of sharp branches.

 

“ **You**!”

The girl regarded him in stupor, her large doe eyes skipping over his form in a chaotic fashion, small pointy upturned nose wrinkled with unabridged disgust as so did her rose-petaled mouth, pressed into a hard line of palpable regret. Her clothes, a strange Ladobelian fashion of a pair of bridges and an embroidered kaftan, in colors of golden sunset over the sea, reflected the light of the moon and made her shine in hues of a fire, as if she was red hot star of her own.

She was pretty, with her high proud cheekbones and her heart-shaped face, but the prince of Sealand was lost for words for a completely different reason.

 

The heiress of Ladobel - and that was her, no doubt - was _flying_.

 

She was flying, her lapels stuck on the twigs, hand tugging on her endless belt that held them connected in a form of a cord.

A question made its way to his mouth and found it slack open. It was quickly remedied.

“You… Look at you..!” He uttered, the rest of the sentence hesitating to come out of sheer unbelievable quality of it. “How…”

The girl seemed to come to her senses a lot faster, her grimace morphing into a state if hautly offence.

“You shot at me,” she shouted from her nest of branches, with a voice that simultaneously suited her, and didn’t. “I was unarmed, and **you shot at me**."

_Well, we are at war_ , Brogan thought of telling her, vaguely remembering shooting at _something_ , but instead, the phase that he uttered was nothing but unabashedly unexcusable. “How… are you flying?”

He tugged at the leash in his hand experimentally, and the princess, though grabbing onto whatever she could, slowly descended his way.

“I’m not _flying_ , I’m _floating_. There’ s difference. Also, stop that, what _are_ you doing?”

 

So she floated, with her clothes, and her auburn hair, and her small pale bare feet. She was surprising pale altogether. Such a contrast to the rest of Ladobelians he had seen - copper sun-liked skin and sky in their eyes. But _she_ , her complexion glimmered with milky whiteness, ivory and porcelain, slender fingers in a vice grip, a bluish bruise on the side on her calf from her collision to the tree, most likely - a small floating statuette of a girl with delightfully murderous expression on her face.

Bringing himself up to his feet, Brogan touched the curled toe that dangled before him, and possibly made an attempt to kick him in the face.

“So you float. In the air. Vertical. _And_ horizontal.” He confirmed, as he pushed slightly, the girl’s face immediately colored with the hue of her clothes.

“Dear mother, I should have let him drown,” she sweared under her breath, as her whole body swinged, head over heels over head, and back again, as he taped the other way against her feet with a sense of strangest giddiness that ever graced him.

“ _Rotational_!”

“Yes, I’m very versatile,” her foot slammed into his shoulder to stop her endless spinning, words flowing with the sound of an exasperated groan. “What do you want from me?”

“How does it feel,” he moved his shoulder away from the foot, so delicate and soft, as if it never knew the weight of her, and pulling her closer. “To be floating?”

 

The whole world held its breath. The princess froze.

From the tips of her tiny toes to the edges of her hair, just for a moment, it was as if she was stuck mid-jump before him, like a instance suspended in a midst of a miracle. Her eyes grew wider, their color one of a burned sugar popsicle that they used to sell on the streets of his capital, in a different, happier time.

The princess of Ladobel floated before him, her skin and hair glaring at him the air of the scorching desert of her homeland, and looked at him, as if no one thought to ask what it was like.

 

“Feel?” She stuttered. Her teeth dug into her lower lip, eyes lost and wandering under a furrowed brow. Searching. “It feels… It feels…”

 

The prince leaned forward, to the difference, to the change, and tried to see in her eyes the essence of it, the extraordinary of her. And for a blink of an eye, it came to him, indescribable, undefinable, like a dull throbbing squeeze of his heart. But another blink and she shrugged it off, violently, baring her teeth at him, the heel of her hand on the damp wool of his uniform, right over the the ridge of his clavicle.

 

The squeeze of her on his heart stayed.

 

“Who cares?! Let me go, right this second! Bird, get me away from this man.”

The falcon, a flash of silver lining in his wings, swooped down from the top of the tree to dig his talons onto Brogan’s shoulder. It gave out a powerful proud deafening skreach.

Something pulled at the corners of the prince’s mouth. The bird waddled, cleaning itself.

“Zephyros, what do you say for yourself? Swapped me for a flying girl?” The flying girl regarded them skeptically. Brogan raised his hand to rub away the uncomfortable stiffness that lingered behind his ribs. It barely worked. “Don’t worry, I would too.”

“You named the bird after a western wind?” The floating princess sniggered. “Smartass.”

His jaw clenched.

“So if the physics is correct, if I let go of this scarf,” and he did, and the material started to slip through his grasp like an upbound stream. The girl squeaked, as the pull holding her in place disappeared and she started to rise, perpendicular to the ground and water surface, like a sun being born out the horizon. But perhaps without manic waving hands and with less daggers of surprised anger thrown his way. His fingers jittered. “You’ll just keep ascending up into the sky until the heaven claims you as its own?”

“Stop it!”

“As you wish,” he squeezed again, then pulled her back, silk wrapped around his wrist. “You obviously don’t have wings, and beyond this, you are almost… _normal_.” The girl’s lower lip pursed. He did not miss that. “Doesn’t look very versatile.”

“Let. Me. Go.” Her small fist descended upon his chest. Her eyes burned full of fury and something else, something that lurked in his mother’s gaze the day he marched out with his army to do what he has been told to. Fear. “Let me go, or I’ll… I’ll kill you!”

“Kill me?” Despite the inkling that she would at least try to claw his eyes out, a very strange sound made it out of his dry throat, cheek spasming unevenly. “You can’t even walk.”

The girl flushed again. Her hand reached for her face, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. “Unbelievable. First you march in here with your whole army, and now you are acting like a child who just got a brand new toy.” Her head rolled back with a groan, exposing him to the delicate column of her neck, speckled with birthmarks. Brogan swallowed. The princess turned her face back at him with hooded eyes and arched eyebrows. “I don’t understand what is happening right now or what you are doing.”

“Neither do I,” he blurred out. One of the princess’ eyebrows lowered. “I was sent here to kill you and here you are and you _float_ \- which is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life, _you_ are the most incredible thing in my life, so I have no idea how am I supposed to kill you now.”

The princess’ face scrunched into some unsaid question, terrified and disbelieving and _flattered_ , and her teeth chewed on her lips, bruising them deep red. Her fingers fisted into his uniform so hard, the water still soaking it streamed down his chest. His hooked under the loop of her belt.

For the first time in his grown life, from the moment he became the tallest man in his kingdom, he was face to face with someone, close enough to see the dimples on their cheeks, their laugh lines. Their cringe of pearly white teeth.

“As strange as it is to see you grin at me like a moron-”

 

 

_Grinning. At her._

_Grinning_. As in _smiling_.

 

 

It barely dropped when he brought his fingers to touch it, the curl at the corners of his mouth, as his chest heaved, and he harked out, like an unattended cough, a laugh.

Because of this girl. _This girl_. This miraculous flying, no, _floating girl._

 

 

“Yes,” she said, head bowed grimly to study his fingers. “Laugh at the floating freak.”

“What make you think I’m laughing at-”

“Because everyone always does!” The note in her voice slipped like a sob, it felt like it ripped right through him, peeling off the scab he thought long healed. Her eyes, though, were decisively dry. “‘Oh, she can’t ride a horse, oh, she can’t fight!’ Big surprise, let's see what you would do, stuck in a tower for a dozen of years.” Her cheeks puffed. “At least I know who Cleopatra, Gloriana, and even bloody Boudica are! Do you?”

 

 

He nodded. The liquid joy in him, such a long forgotten feeling, splashed against his ragged edges, despite the sting, despite his scarring, despite the weight he kept on his shoulders for so long he forgot what it felt like when he didn’t.

And suddenly he wanted to show this girl everything that he could be. A devil inside him curled his tail.

 

  
“So are you… A witch?”

“What- NO!” She whirled, hair flicking against her face, as if she was submerged under water. “There is no such thing as magic.”

His briskly raised eyebrow disagreed. “And what do you call this?”

“Just the girl who cried so much her feet stopped touching the ground, and who was raised by three handmaidens and one frauline who should have known better.”

 

  
The princess straightened, letting go of his coat, and fixing her own attire. Fireflies swarmed over the water, getting stuck on her hair and reflecting from the beads and pallets, that embroidered her clothes. Her hands paused, briefly, by her waist, fingers inches away from touching his skin, but she quickly worked her way around it.

“Princess Marianne Isadora Delilah Darcy, the crown princess of Ladobel.” Shoulders wide and back straight, she gave him her hand, palm up and open between them.

 

  
Ah, they were doing this now.

 

  
Brogan gave himself a quick look-over.

He was a complete mess. Wet dripping clothes, with mud caking on his arms and knees, hair clinging to his gaunt face - and yet, his mother must have taught him well. His empty hand gripped hers, turning it, small soft thing with pen calluses and papercuts of a person who turned too many pages in their life, and brought it to his still stubbornly smiling mouth. He must have been quite a sight, since the princess blanched and curled slightly onto herself.

“Prince Arthur Brogan Theodor Montgomery Kingsley, the heir of Sealand,” he replied, nodding graciously.

“That explains quite a few things,” the princess nodded pensively in return. She briskly pulled her hand out of his. “Now that the pleasantries are taken care of, give me your sword so that we can fight fair and square. I can’t let you leave this place.”

 

  
He turned, finally able to take his eyes away from her. Moon, large and white, hang low over the wall of trees around them, fireflies whizzing through them like runaway stars, while their sisters hang judgingly in place above, in the sky that seemed so much higher than back at home. The moon river, rippling and alive, ran to his feet, ending around his leaking boots. “This place? And what _is_ this place?”

“What matters is that you are not going anywhere with a knowledge of this lake.”

Taking advantage of his misguided attention, she pulled on his clothes, trying to get to the sword, still hanging, surprisingly, on his belt. Her fingers reached as far as the hilt before his wrapped around her wrist.

“Do you even know how to use that?”

“I’m self-taught,” she growled, the top of her head pressed against the edge of his jaw. “I fenced my handmaidens.”

“You meant to say ‘with your handmaidens’, yes?”

“Hilarious. Give me your sword and I’ll show you.”

Her hair smelled of dust and old stone.

“Keep that up and I just might. You are just full of phenomenal surprises so far.”

 

There is was again, the rigid jerkiness, and _Marianne_ , the floating princess, let go of his weapon, and raised a poignant flustered look at him.

 

“If you think I don’t understand what you are doing, prince Arthur Brogan Something-”

“Bog,” he corrected, and his childhood name, the name his father used, coming to him easier than he ever thought it might.

“‘Bog’?”

“Yes?”

“Alright, _Bog_ ,” she bit her lip again. It kept being endearing. “You can stop flirting with me right now.” And then, with her ears growing pink: “It’s not working.”

“I’m not-” he replied, and wondered how they ended up like this, his arm curled around her waist, pressing their chests together, hand in hand, her scarf tangled in the water. He wondered how one girl he just met can give him so much _joy_. “I’m not.” A shuckle tickled the roof of his mouth. “Don’t you see how _world-changing_ you are?”

There she was, freezing again. Surely she would be aware of her unique merits?

“You… You…”

 

  
And then, glorious in her glimmering weightless furious splendor, princess Marianne Isadora Something-Something punched him in the face. To both of their surprises, he didn’t let her go.

 

  
“You _Casanova_! And now you dare lie to me! I hate when people lie to me.”

“Excuse me..? Let me be clear, I have no such intentions towards you - _Lord_ , you punch **hard** for such a delicate looking thing - and even if I did-”

“AHA!” Her finger stabbed him in the chest, absolutely victorious. Her body rose and fell with the sway of her triumph, yet somehow it concerned him less than the idea that she might get wet being stuck to him like that. “Knew it, Bog the Sealand prince who keeps smiling at me - and aren’t you supposed to be Sullen? Or Sad? Or-”

“Solemn, yes, I _know_. Working on it.” He brushed his wet strands away from his forehead.

The princess cringed. “I’m so onto that hair thing.”

“As I was saying, if I were to flirt with you, I would go about it differently. For example, I would start with a dance.” He fastened his arm around her a bit tighter, to show the point.

 

Marianne’s fingers drummed merrily at his shoulder. She attempted to knee him. It didn’t work. “I just thought of something: if I’d let you drown, I could have tied myself to your floating corpse and used it as a raft to sail all the way to the capital.” The fingers of her other hand, the punching one, snapped in dismay. “That would have been some quick thinking. But do go on with this charade. Small note though: hate dancing, never danced.”

“Well, neither did I, but we seem to be doing just fine so far,” he leaned his head to the side, and gripped a fist flying at his face again. His feet side-stepped, slowly, for a turn. “Next, some idle conversation. Be warned: I’m an amazing listener.”

“Oh,” her bright lips pursed in fake surprise. “Like what? I doubt you are competent enough to discuss Richard The Third with me.”

“I’m not even going to pretend to. How about some lighter topics: were you home schooled, or did you go to some sort of an academy-”

“Yes, a Royal Academy for Floating Girls. Brilliant.” She pushed away from him, but it only ended up with her leaning back, and then coming up under the power of her levity and his gentle guidance. “How about the topic of how your army killed my brother, which forced my father to drag me onto the throne, after which you proceeded to declare war on us _again_ \- do you even know diplomatic and military procedure? Or is it as bad as your small talk?”

Oh, and there was that. The reason he was here in the first place. Though the princess didn’t seem to be grieving in the slightest. “I’m… sorry for your loss-”

“Don’t. I barely knew him. Comes from being an abomination locked in a tower until everyone forgets you even exist.”

 

  
She could not be serious, could she?

 

  
“You are quite… lovely for an abomination.”

She smirked. “I bet you tell that to all the Sealand queen wanna-bes.”

Ah, funny. “Or, as you may have guessed from the questionable insufferability of my face, the lack of thieroff.”

“Would not have figured,” she frowned, possibly without a hint of sarcasm, something in him suddenly hoped. “Is that why you are still a prince at your age? Do you have the crowning law of marriage?”

“ _My age_ \- I’m **twenty two** , Marianne. But yes, we do have a crowning law. I’m just… ”

“Let me guess: ‘not ready yet’? I think Alexander used the same excuse for all the poor noble ladies who cried their silly tears about him.”

“I don’t think I will ever be able to. It's not a secret that women like you don’t like men who cannot muster a smile at them.”

 

Marianne regarded him, eyes dropping briefly to his lips, as if double checking. And if he briefly glanced at hers, her small teeth digging into her lower lip, plump and soft-looking, she might have accidentally missed it.

“Really?” She smirked, and maybe now she noticed, the glimmer in her eyes on the edge of playful. “What do you call this?”

“Magic.”

She rolled her neck, her laugh a bird-song, a choir of bells. “You are _horrible_. There is no such thing as magic.”

“Stranger things happened.”

 

  
Like sudden hurricanes. Like a forest between a desert and a sea. Like a lake.

Like a floating woman, a vision of the desert sun, with a fury of one, witty and determined, but sweet and tender, with a pain woven right into her very being.

 

  
“Next you tell me that dragons exist.”

“No? I have one right here,” and he dropped her down, almost to the sheet of water, to hear that laugh again. “A fiery one.”

 

  
Her smile, her laugh.

 

_This woman._

 

  
“Beware my roar,” she murmured. Her locks of hair floated up at him, edges tickling his brow.

  
And

  
“I feel _light_.” The dips on her cheeks left crow feet in the edges of her eyes. “I thought you wanted to know.”

 

 

Light. That’s what she was.

 

  
“Yes, you are.”

 

And then her levity and his gravity turned their smiles into a kiss.

 

"Not working," she muttered into a breath that she drew right out of him, and kissed him.

 

_Again_.

 

_And again_.

 

And Bog sweared, that for a moment, he _soared_. 

 

 


End file.
